Aftermath
by astral-angel
Summary: He was hers, and now he's gone. Kate centric, minor KateTony implied.


**Title:** Aftermath  
**Fandom:** NCIS  
**Character:** Kate Todd  
**Table:** Table 2  
**Prompt:** 091 - Live Like You Were Dyin' Tim McGraw  
**Word Count:** 968  
**Rating:** PG  
**Pairings:** Minor Kate/Tony implied.  
**Summary:** He was _hers_, and now he's _gone_.  
**Author's Notes:** Spoilers for 2.23 - Twilight. Written for the **100songs** challenge at LiveJournal. **  
Disclaimer:** All characters belong to Donald P. Bellasario, CBS and others. I own nothing.

Close your eyes.

Take a deep breath. Count to ten.

Exhale.

Open your eyes.

The voice washed over her, supposedly soothing. There was nothing remotely soothing about the fact that she was sitting in this sterile office with its whitewashed walls and uncomfortable chairs.

She doubted that there would ever be an occasion where she would be soothed by visiting a psychiatrist.

"I understand what a loss this must be for you."

She feels like snarling at him, and so she does. He doesn't know how she feels about this. His use of the word 'loss' has her glaring, eyes narrowed. Loss implies actually losing something, which in turn implies finding it.

She has no loss.

She has a void.

A big, gaping black hole that started out as a small ball in the depths of her gut and seems to be expanding, sucking at her bones and blood and skin until she thinks that there is nothing left of her but her brain, because she can't stop _thinking_ about it.

And she doesn't want to think about it, so she stares at the man sitting at the desk and perversely enjoys his sudden nervousness. She knows that the others seem to view Gibbs' team in some sort of awe and/or terror, and where it had frustrated her before, it simply amused now. The smirk on her face is familiar and tugs at the heart she thought she no longer had.

She cuts the strings, quickly, ruthlessly. They have a mission to finish, a man to kill (torture, maim), and if this man in front of her even thinks that she is fragile (lost, vulnerable, confused), he will try and stop her.

It won't work, but she's found that things are usually easier if they're official.

And she refuses to let emotions get in the way. She knows the other others think it's unhealthy that she hasn't cried yet (not Gibbs, but then he's always been a bastard), but if she cries, she doesn't think she'll be able to stop (how long would it take someone to cry themselves out of tears and love and hope anyway?).

They made a decision on the rooftop that day. There was no other choice, really, not for them. They had looked at each other in the aftermath, when they'd finally been left alone, eyes flat and glassy. Broken. Hard.

Their road had been chosen.

The shrink starts talking again, but she can't decipher the words anymore. The void has reached her senses, and her perception has become warped.

She has felt something like this before (only three weeks, and why was fate so fucking _cruel_), but it has never been quite to this magnitude. She snorts derisively, disbelievingly. The hell he knew what she was feeling. No body knew what she was feeling. No one _knew_.

She wonders if she is being selfish, and decides that she is. She doesn't care.

He was _hers_, and now he's _gone_.

The thought twists her mouth into another snarl, and the shrink shuts up. She looks at him, glares, and then walks out. The director won't be happy, but he'll understand. She thinks that Gibbs would have congratulated her, but he's as dead as she is, and so she knows that he's feeling what she's feeling.

Nothing.

She's empty, cold but for the dark flame of hate that keeps her body temperature at a level that lets her function. She thinks Gibbs is probably burning from it, and is pleased (melodramatic, yes, but it reminded her of him, and that was all she needed).

They were one and two and three, but now he's gone. She might as well have gone with him. She knows it could've (should've) been her. It would have been her if he hadn't been an ass like usual and shoved at her playfully.

Abby hasn't looked her in the eye in two days.

Ducky thinks she should talk to someone (but has pointedly refrained from offering his own services).

McGee is McGee and so starts to say something comforting before wisely shutting up. He surprises both her and Gibbs by burning with them.

She thinks he wants to follow them, but can't help but wonder if Abby will stop him. She finds it ironic that Abby was her best friend _(before_, anyway), and was still in the dark about most of it.

She used to think of them as a circle. But now he's gone (dead, disappeared, under dirt and bugs and death roses) and the circle is broken.

Somehow it doesn't surprise her that he had been the glue to hold them together.

The sudden lull in voices lets her know that she's arrived in the bullpen and that the others have seen her. She sits at her desk and looks blankly at the desk opposite her. Files are still littered across the surface haphazardly and a half built paper plane sits on his keyboard. She expects him to appear magically, moaning about the incident with McGee and the water bottle, and blinks when he doesn't.

'_Maybe it's like falling in love. It can happen … like that.'_

His voice echoes in her head and she starts. Her heart rate increases tenfold and her nails bite into her skin.

She could have ended this a year and a half ago with a scalpel and blood and muscle.

Tony (with the cheesy smirk, and the never ending one liners and the soft, gentle hands) is dead.

And it's all her fault, because she couldn't kill him, and then couldn't die.

She blinks, and shakes her head. A half buried memory of her dad's off key singing comes back to her _(someday I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying_), and she smiles bitterly.

She has things to do.

**Fin**


End file.
